Seven-year-old Piper Palin — who’s the same age as Sasha Obama — provided one of those moments last night at the Republican convention that makes parents like me, the mother of a 7-year-old boy, simultaneously laugh and cringe.
While Sasha Obama stole some of her mother Michelle’s thunder at the Democratic convention last week when she took the microphone and bellowed greetings to her dad via satellite TV, Piper Palin was sitting in the audience near her dad Todd last night and was holding her baby brother during her mom’s speech. Then Piper “groomed” her little bro in a moment only a parent of another little kid could love. ( Video clip here.)
When it comes to crazy-long school supply lists, apparently my kids’ public schools aren’t the only ones doling them out. The New York Times ran a page one piece about schools in the New York area and elsewhere which are asking parents to shell out big bucks for supplies, including one mom who had ”10 boxes of baby wipes” on her kindergartener’s list.
“. . . [A]ccording to the New York State School Boards Association, supplies run an average of $100 for high school students and $60 for middle schoolers,” the paper reported. In some school districts, the school supply lists have grown so large that school boards have stepped in and placed caps on how much families should be asked to spend:
“In the suburbs of Rochester, the Gates Chilli Central School District last year capped the amount that parents were expected to spend on supplies at $10 a child, adding $100,000 to the budget to make up the difference. The sprawling Fayette County Public Schools in Lexington, Ky., set the limit this fall of $120 a child for the year, including field trips.”
Item #2: How Palin Does It
Answer (according to press reports): Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin has a husband named Todd. Who’s the father of their five kids. Who works part-time. And takes care of the children (all but the baby and the eldest – who’s deploying to Iraq this month – are in school all day). The Palin family, you see, works together. Just like the Obama family, only no one’s asking Barack Obama how he’s managing to parent his two school-aged daughters while he’s on the campaign trail. So let’s back off the Palin-is-a-bad-mom garbage, why don’t we. It’s an unbecomingly sexist attack. ‘Nuf said.
Item #3: ‘Hockey Mom’ Humor
The line of the night, as Sarah Palin accepted the Republican’s VP nomination: “You know [what] they say [is] the difference between a hockey mom and a pit-bull? [*pause*] Lipstick.”
Palin’s speech — including the lipstick comment, at 8:50 – can be found here.
As I continued to marvel at the surprising GOP vice presidential selection, I fired off a column about my impressions of Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin’s first national speech to the folks at Mommy Track’d in a piece entitled, “McCain & The Working Mom.”
Additionally, I wrote an essay about the difficulties working women have when they are asked to speak at national political conventions when their spouses are running for president, called, “Michelle As First Lady: General Election Edition.”
It will be interesting to see how much her motherhood and her baby play into the media coverage of her selection. Barack Obama has two little girls — ages 7 and 10 — but his wife and his mother-in-law are taking care of them while he’s out on the campaign trail. Will Palin’s husband garner the type of coverage Michelle Obama gets when it comes to issues of balancing work and family? This, my friends, is going to be very, very interesting.
I love the way cartoonist Jan Eliot’s mind works. In her Stone Soupcomics, she’s able to put into pictures what I labor to do with words. So, a few months ago, when Eliot e-mailed me to ask me if I’d write a blurb for her new collection of cartoons, This Might NOT Be Pretty, I felt honored.
“Jan Eliot has been spying on my family,” reads the blurb I wrote that’s on the back cover of Eliot’s newly-released book, the seventh in the Stone Soup series. “There’s no other explanation why Stone Soup so accurately captures the absurdly realistic yet painfully funny antics that go on in my house. Stone Soup is a window into the gloriously flawed American family.”
The book’s great for when you need to know that you’re not the only one who, as you’re raising your children, finds yourself in patently preposterous situations.
Item #2: ‘Desperate Housewives’ Trailer
Season five of Desperate Housewives, a once razor-sharp satire of modern life in the ‘burbs, is on the horizon. (Premieres September 28.) This season the show shifts five years into the future where everything has supposedly changed for the Wisteria Lane residents, most markedly for Eva Longoria’s character Gabby Solis, now a non-glamorous mother of two, while some of Felicity Huffman’s character’s kids are now teens and on a first name basis with the friendly folks at the local juvenile detention center.
Huffman has said that the half-decade time jump has invigorated Desperate Housewives’ writers and that the characters’ slate of stories has been wiped clean. I certainly hope so. The show has lost its mojo in recent years and just hasn’t been as good as it was in season one and early on in season two. I hope it can redeem itself. And soon. I’m rooting for Huffman.
Item #3: Tonight’s Historic Moment
Regardless of your political affiliation or for whom you plan to cast your vote for president in November, there is no question that tonight’s speech by Illinois Senator Barack Obama formally accepting his party’s nomination for president is a historic one for our country, particularly coming on the 45th anniversary of the Martin Luther King Jr.’s “I Have a Dream” speech. That’s the iconic speech our children are shown in their classrooms every January, the one they hear when they learn about the condition of race relations in the 1960s when King spoke and why the Civil Rights Act was eventually passed.
Fast-forward four decades later, and you can now explain to your own kiddos with pride how far our country has come from that moment to this one. This is a moment they’ll want to remember.
Anyone catch the Obama girls during Monday night’s Democratic convention? Seven-year-old Sasha and 10-year-old Malia were adorable and a bit precocious. As they came onto the stage to hug their mother Michelle after she told a national audience that the Obama family is just like anyone else’s, the girls turned toward a creepy Orwellian TV screen with their father’s face on it. They offered Barack their high-pitched greetings and awkwardly interrupted his own political pitch.
I always love it when kids drag their politician parents off-message when the media’s watching. In those moments we get to see a glimpse of the pols’ authentic selves, the part that remains unpolished by political consultants. Meanwhile we mere mortal parents are interrupted and pulled off-message on a daily basis — on the phone, during attempts to discuss something at the dinner table – although not while we’re in front of a television audience.
Not for college graduations or even high school graduations. We’re talkin’ eighth grade graduations, at least ones highlighted recently in the New York Times.
During a Father’s Day speech, Senator Barack Obama commented on such celebrations, saying: “This is just eighth grade. So let’s not go over the top. Let’s not have a huge party. Let’s just give them a handshake. You’re supposed to graduate from eighth grade.”
My kids are years away from eighth grade, so what say you middle school parents: Is the eighth grade graduation scene over-the-top or is the Times just highlighting extremes? Do you think the media are sensationalizing this and that there’s nothing wrong with having a big, happy party?
I must admit, a question mark lingers over my head in a cartoonish balloon when it comes to this story. I’m sure you’ve heard about it if you listen to talk radio or watch cable chattering head shows (which I’ll be watching tonight while The Girl commandeers the “good” TV to watch Camp Rock on the Disney Channel). A large group of teens, all ages 16 and under, from Gloucester, Mass. made a pact to all get pregnant at around the same time so they’d all become moms at the same time. And 17 are pregnant. The story was featured in Time Magazineand makes my heart sick on so many different levels. Why would girls be focused on procreating instead of going to college or pursuing a career? (Don’t blame Juno as they made the pact before the charming, independent film about the teen who got pregnant by accident and gave her baby up for adoption, was released.)
The magazine reports:
“The girls who made the pregnancy pact — some of whom, according to [Gloucester High School Principal Joseph] Sullivan, reacted to the news that they were expecting with high fives and plans for baby showers — declined to be interviewed. So did their parents. But Amanda Ireland, who graduated from Gloucester High on June 8, thinks she knows why these girls wanted to get pregnant. Ireland, 18, gave birth her freshman year and says some of her now pregnant schoolmates regularly approached her in the hall, remarking how lucky she was to have a baby. ‘They’re so excited to finally have someone to love them unconditionally,’ Ireland says. ‘I try to explain it’s hard to feel loved when an infant is screaming to be fed at 3 a.m.’”
Item #2: Michelle Obama, Target Customer
US Weekly, which usually trafficks in sensational celeb-related garbage reporting, features Barack and Michelle Obama on its cover this week bearing the headline, “Why Barack Loves Her.” The story is largely a pro-Obama puff piece but has a number of interesting mom-related tidbits of info. “. . . [W]hen not on the road, the mom [Michelle Obama] can be seen in her Chicago neighborhood driving to Target for toilet paper and buying clothing for her girls at The Gap and Limited Too.”
The Obamas had difficulty getting pregnant, according to Us, and now are hands-on parents, when they’re home with the 6- and 10-year-old girls, a challenge these days for their presidential nominee father who’s on the road most of the time. Us said: “With the help of a housekeeper but no nanny, Michelle certainly has found her smart-mom shortcuts: She relies on headbands for bad-hair days, claims dessert at school potlucks so she can buy a pie and, until recently, packed Oscar Mayer Lunchables and juice boxes into her kids’ lunches. (She has now cut out processed food, after her pediatrician worried her oldest daughter ‘was tipping the scale,’ as she puts it.)”
Local mom and author Meredith O'Brien gives you a peek behind the picket fences of modern day parenting. With humor and candor, it's her take on real parenting in the real world.
Local mom and author Meredith O'Brien gives you a peek behind the picket fences of modern day parenting. With humor and candor, it's her take on real parenting in the real world.
